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"Pick Your Poison" by Samantha Fortenberry

[And That's All I Have to Say About That]


                                                                   1.      This is a way of explaining things so that you can understand.        

                                                                                                       2.      In this poem, take the legs as a proxy for the penis.                          

       ,   I know I can’t do anything to help you.

Four hundred, thirty-one miles. I was trying anyway, trying out on Lieutenant Dan’s knotted sea knobs on the road into Egypt--

sweat stink. Beard all

                          Moses-like. Jenny, we were                                                                        red and white.

We were            my special shoes,

                                                                supporting some pre-       stage polio,                      a sheer gown, or sheet, over the jungle floor faces

of the god damned burnt up bodies,        bullfrogs already biting us



up in the ass and soaking the chocolates we haven’t yet eaten in a blue Volkswagen ejaculation.                               

                                                                                                                                                                                                                    That made us run.

Now,             “Is there a Mr. Gump, Mrs. Gump?”                                             Repeat these sounds back to me; overnight, in the night. Come

and repeat, stop only to sleep, the same young boy, just because we feel like it, mimicking the sounds of his mother’s bedroom, the

screams of her blood, the crimson tide; the cliché phrase,

                                                                                                           I won’t say it.

## 44, penetrating the D-Line, carrying the rock toward the end zone, the white the crimson running like the wind blows in a wild

montage set to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind”. ROLLLLLLLL TIDE. GO. RED AND WHITE.

                           the time:    three years; two months; fourteen days; sixteen hours. We’ve been running;

a storm of many squeaks, jags, prongs even, to the leg, throwing shoes     rocks    a bulldozer toward the house    until

collapsing          the body    until    collapsing into your nipples    and into my nipples.


The same young boy bounded by the breaking (in) of his shoes, coming                over his (obstructions),

those shoes you gave me, you were                  those shoes. Red and white. Fast and stupid.

Some identity, between a bird and a forest        in a pair of Nikes

and for no particular reason at all         caught like a wildfire out of control

young and strong, you were running                                                   against the wind.


COREY ZIELINSKI is currently pursuing a PhD in Poetics at SUNY Buffalo. When he is not reading obscure literature or writing term papers, he enjoys going for the occasional run or eating chicken fried rice (and sometimes does both at the same time).

SAMANTHA FORTENBERRY is a photographer from a small town in Northern Alabama. She currently studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Ever since high school she's taken a passion to photography and photographs various subjects from surreal landscapes to fine art nudes and everything in between. Website: samanthafortenberry.com
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